Blogging analysis of the TRC report
'Morning all.
I understand the TRC site was down earlier, possibly swamped by visitor traffic. I believe I may bear some responsibility for that problem (he said, blushing): Before I went to bed last night, I posted a short item about the report to the online community Metafilter. When its denizens, sometimes referred to as MeFites, decide to look at something en masse, they can create some serious Web traffic, and that might be what happened. Since I posted, the item already has drawn 20 comments, the tone of which will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the local discussion of the events of Nov. 3.
I'm going to start with the exec summary and keep going 'til I'm done with the report. I'll do a minimum of one post per section (I may update a post with multiple points/observations). Feel free to comment at any point, particularly if you have a question about something I've written or think I might be missing or misinterpreting something.
For those who might care, here's my background on this subject:
I was a sophomore in college when the shootings happened. I did not arrive in Greensboro until the spring of '87. One of my first assignments here was to cover the Klan march here that spring, the first since the shootings. At that time, I was immersed in the history of the event. Since then, I've done little reporting on it.
In the mid-1990s, an online acquaintance tipped me that the Justice Department had finally declassified its files on the case. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking copies, and I had to nurse that request for better than two years before we finally got them -- if memory serves, in mid-1999, just in time for my colleague Lorraine Ahearn to write about them for the 20th anniversary of the shootings. I didn't do any reporting off the files then, and I've not written anything about the shootings since that I can recall.
Executive summary:
p. 2: "We ... acknoledg[e] that healing, hope and reconciliation are long-term goals that must take place across what currently are deep divides of distrust and skepticism in our community." They're not kidding themselves, then.
p. 3: " ... serious limitations in the resources available to us, as well as fear of and hostility toward our process, have restricted our ability to review all the evidence available." I'd be interested in knowing precisely what evidence commissioners believe exists that they haven't had access to.
Findings & conclusions, p. 6: Well, let's not mess around: "[We find] that on the morning of Nov. 3, 1979, members of the Klan/Nazi caravan headed for Greensboro with malicious intent. At a minimum, they planned to disrupt the parade and assault the demonstrators (by throwing eggs), violating the marchers' constitutional rights to free speech and assembly."
Translation: We think there was a criminal conspiracy.
"Further, we believe ... in order to be victorious in any violence that occurred." (I'm not going to retype long passages verbatim; I hope you can read along.) So the Klan/Nazis intended to start a fight and win it, although the last sentence of that passage also can be interpreted to mean that they were prepared to act in self-defense if someone else started a fight.
Which would be legal. And, as it turned out, was their defense in court.
Still on p. 6: But not all caravan members bear equal responsibility. We find the heaviest burden of responsibility is on those (Roland Wood, Coleman Pridmore, Jack Fowler, David Matthrews, and Jerry Paul Smith) who, after they returned to their cars and their path of exit was cleared, went to the trunk of the last car to retrieve weapons. They then fired at demonstrators, fatally wounding [four who were unarmed] ... Sampson had a handgun, and was firing it when he was fatally shot.
And that's where the self-defense argument falls apart. The five named men had walked back to their cars, apparently safely. Their "path of exit was cleared" (although the summary doesn't say how or by whom, or how it previously had been obstructed). They chose to open the car trunk. They chose to pull out weapons. And they chose to start the shooting (between two and five shots before any CWP members returned fire, the commissioners say elsewhere on the page), apparently in the absence of any direct, immediate threat.
If you believe in individual responsibility, there's the nut of the whole thing right there ... because last I checked, we don't shoot people in this country for saying unpopular things, even when (as the commission suggests elsewhere) those things are naive to the point of stupidity.
Still on p. 6: WVO/CWP: We also find that some, albeit lesser, responsibility must lie with the demonstrators who beat on the caravan cars as they passed. No kidding. If you damage the car, it's a crime, and it almost certainly created a level of uneasiness among the occupants that made violence more likely. But, as noted above, the Klan-Nazi folks had a clear path to leave and chose not to take it.
11:04 a.m.: Eh. Got tied up on the phone. Will resume shortly.
p. 7: The Commission finds that the WVO leadership was very naive about the level of danger posed by their rhetoric and the Klan's propensity for violence, and they even dismissed concerns raised by their own members.
A friend of mine likened the Communists' rhetoric to "yelling fire in a crowded theater," the classic example in constitutional law of speech that isn't protected by the First Amendment. I don't think the comparison is apt. The situation it describes doesn't get protection because of the likely danger to innocent third parties, rather than because of the likelihood of violent retaliation from the party to whom the speech is directed.
As I said above, this is supposed to be a country where we don't shoot people for things they say. But when you say something that could be interpreted as a death threat, and you say it about, and to, a group -- the Klan -- with a documented history of extreme violence (much of it never subject to legal consequence), you have to be aware of the possibility.
However, we also find that this miscalculation was caused in part by the Greensboro Police Department, which did not inform either the WVO or Morningside residents about the Klan's plans and its coordination with other racist groups.
Fair enough. But that said, the communists' anti-Klan rhetoric didn't start on Nov. 3. It had been going on for a long time, and you didn't need the Greensboro Police Department to tell you that the Klan could get angry and violent. At least, I didn't think you did, but then I grew up near here (Charlotte). aMany of the demonstrators didn't. Maybe they thought of the Klan as more caricature than threat. I don't know.
